Suggested feature. Display game arcade flyer in netdimm_menu

[shundi12]

I’m not sure this software is being actively developed anymore, but would it be possible to display an image of a game’s arcade flyer when said game has the cursor next to it? I suppose bandwidth might be an issue with the communication between the computer and the Naomi hardware with the computer having to potentially push up an each time the selection changes.

Or perhaps compile a load of flyers in png format and display them either when the game is next to the cursor or perhaps selecting the game brings up a menu with details about the game along with the flyer and screenshots of the game. The player can then decide if they want to boot it or not.

This is a great bit of software by the way and I don’t have to use python 2 anymore :)

[DragonMinded]

A high-bandwidth location for images would be just sending raw data to the cart space. So, you would just use the two-way communication to request the PC store the image at a certain location, the PC controlling it would put the image in the right spot using the standard upload commands, and then the PC would send a response back to the on-screen menu that the image is available. So yeah, it would be pretty possible to do that.

Alternatively, when the menu boots, it could request all the flyers in a similar fashion and then just index into the received images.

But yeah, I do not work on this software anymore. I was hoping that chunksinspace would contribute back his changes and settings files, but he never did :\ Anyone can enhance it, however.

[shundi12]

Great thanks. I was looking over the code yesterday and I somewhat understand it. I’ve never used C before but I am a Go software developer and I might be able to mess about with Naomi menu homebrew. Will need to be able to compile that first and I’m not sure if it’s worth sticking with Windows or setting up a Linux virtual machine to do this. Will also have to have a way of testing it. I’ve got a Naomi NetBoot setup but would rather test with an emulator while messing about with it. Is there an emulator that allows netbooting? Or did you develop this software with real hardware.

[DragonMinded]

To my knowledge, no emulator supports netbooting. MAME is closest and has some commented out stuff that suggests it would run the netboot firmware, but I don't know enough about their macro hell to get anything working there. For accuracy and speed while testing normal games and stuff I just used Demul Naomi edition which worked fine. But yes, I developed this software with real hardware. Basically everything was developed on actual hardware. Note that there is a GDB stub so you can do on-target debugging, but it's hard to get that to play nicely with the menu PC-side controlling script since they both use the same registers and interrupts for communication.

[shundi12]

Ah ok, thought it might be easier to develop everything on a PC. Thanks for letting me know. First job is to setup an environment to be able to compile the NetBoot menu homebrew. If I do manage to get that far without losing interest (I have other arcade related projects that quite easily distract me 😂) I’m thinking of creating a new “Screen” that gets loaded after a game has selected and displays screenshots and details of the game, then it can be launched from there. I’m not sure if I’ll even be able to do that, but that’s my idea anyway 😁.